


Don't Even Try to Pretend

by SeeEmRunning



Series: Right Now (We'll Stand) [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Quantico (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-11-03 09:59:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10964937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeeEmRunning/pseuds/SeeEmRunning
Summary: The UN has received intelligence that someone at Quantico's FBI Academy is planning a terrorist attack. Hermione and Green are tasked with finding and stopping him.You don't have to have read the first 3 parts to the series, as long as you read the notes on the first chapter. Still, it will help you understand if you do choose read the beginning of the series!





	1. Camillo Farmer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hermione Granger has been working for the UN's Black Ops division for 18 years. Two weeks before this story starts, she asked her supervisor (Barrel) to retire. This story starts with her enjoying a two-week vacation while her leg heals from a gunshot wound.

A knock on the door of her hotel room signaled the end of Hermione’s vacation. Gun in one hand, wand in the other, she peered through the eyehole and relaxed as she recognized Barrel and Green waiting patiently for her.

She cracked open the door. “Got any food?”

Barrel raised a bag. “Pineapple chicken.”

She opened the door all the way and allowed them in. “Good to see you again, Barrel. Green.”

“Ma’am,” Green said.

Barrel set the bag down on the table. “I really did bring food,” he told her. “Chinese. Well, Americanized Chinese. We can do this over lunch.”

“Sounds good,” she said, tucking her gun into her waistband and her wand behind her ear.

Barrel smiled briefly. “Thought it might. Sit. Eat.”

Hermione joined the two men at the table. Once they’d served themselves, Barrel said, “How was your vacation?”

“Fabulous,” she said. “Thank you for setting it up.”

He waved it off. “You deserved it. How’s your leg?”

“Fine now.”

“Good.” He pulled a folder from his shoulder bag. “Next assignment is in Virginia. Green’ll be coming along.”

“Partner?”

“Trainee.”

Hermione flipped open the folder. “Quantico,” she said. “FBI?”

“Director thinks there’s a mole there. Intelligence confirms somebody is planning a terrorist attack, but it doesn’t know who or what. You two will have to find that out yourselves.”

“And when we do, wet or dry?”

“Dry if possible.”

“If it’s not possible?”

“No real loss.” He pulled a manila envelope from his bag and dropped it on the table. “Covers. Green’ll be going in as a female so you can be roommates. He’s a Squib, so we can give him potions to make it more authentic.”

“Are you a Squib, too?” Green asked her.

Hermione pulled the manila envelope closer and opened it. “Witch.” She tossed Green one of the covers and opened the other for herself.

Barrel said, “Are you okay to Transfigure you both?”

“I’ll make it work,” she said, scanning the pages in front of her.

“Excellent.” 

While they ate, they quizzed Green on the basics of maintaining a female cover identity - speech patterns, aggression, periods, breasts. By the end of it, he was blushing so thoroughly Hermione was tempted to cast a Cooling Charm on him.

“You’ll check out tomorrow and meet us at the safe house in DC,” Barrel told her. “You remember it?”

She searched her memory. “Is that the one with the ‘80s kitchen?”

“No. All right, I got it in mind.”

“ _Legilimens._ ”

It was still incredible to her, that Barrel trusted her enough to let her inside his mind. He was a Muggle or No-Maj or whatever, so he had no real chance of keeping her out, but the willingness was breathtaking. He trusted her to not go digging for secrets, to not try to take him over or shred him until he couldn’t breathe without help. He trusted that she would go only as deep as necessary.

And that’s exactly what she did, on those few occasions she Legilimized him. Right there, on the surface of his thoughts, beneath the nerves that came with opening up on such a deep level, was a living room with a plaid couch and loveseat catty-corner to each other, with a brown recliner to the right, a foot locker between the recliner and the loveseat, and a red chair and footrest to the left.

“Got it,” she said, pulling out.

Barrel pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “I think that’s harder on me than you.”

She shrugged. “It usually is. How’s your heart?”

“Calming down.”

That was one of the unfortunate side effects of Legilimizing someone who hadn’t spent a good deal of time around magic: cast too many spells or directly affect them for too long, and they were liable to have a heart attack or a stroke. It was one of many reasons the International Statute of Secrecy existed, and why breaking it was so serious an offense.

“Smile?”

Barrel smiled weakly. “You’re good,” she pronounced.

“Excellent.”

“What was that?” Green asked curiously.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said. 

“Until then,” Barrel said, standing up.

“Til then,” she said, following suit. Barrel and Green left. Hermione pulled out her cover identity, intent on memorizing it all before the next day.  
***  
She Apparated straight to the safe house the following morning after a pre-dawn breakfast. The dossier had said the check-in for trainees was at 3PM, and she knew she would need at least two hours to Transfigure herself and probably three for Green. Maybe more - Gender-Swap Potions were tricky and could have unexpected effects. Barrel would make Green drink it before they even got in the car, since it had valerian and Hermione preferred to not spend half the day unconscious and a further week unable to stand. She wouldn’t know exactly what she was dealing with until they arrived.

She found a bathroom and flipped the file folder open to the photograph Barrel had created. Working from the top down, she chopped her hair into a pixie cut and turned it a dark auburn. Her complexion lightened to a pale tan; pockmarks and acne scars appeared. Aiming far more carefully, she turned her eyes from chocolate brown to forest green, and made them both taller and wider. Her eyelashes elongated. Her face lengthened, from a circle to an oval, and she manipulated her jawbone to give it a more rectangular shape. Her cheekbones moved higher and became more pronounced. She gave herself sharp lips and a long, thin nose that dipped down at the end.

She held the photograph up and examined it critically, comparing each part of her face to the photograph. The two images were close enough that any tiny discrepancy could be passed off as a trick of the camera. The scar running across her face would also help to distract from minor errors.

She put down the headshot and looked at the measurements given. Now she was working around internal organs, and so had to be a bit more careful with her casting. She’d been given small breasts - always a blessing - but wide hips. The body shape was very nearly the definition of ‘pear’. Here, too, curse scars wrapped around her flesh, and she couldn’t do a damn thing to hide them.

She finished with her makeover just before eight and took one last look in the mirror. “Hello, Emilia Planter,” she mumbled.

Ravenous and a bit tired, she went in search of the kitchen and scarfed three protein bars as the coffee brewed. The coffee wasn’t enough to keep her awake, and she fell asleep on the sofa after putting up a quick ward to alert her if anyone came near.

She was woken near ten and sat up, yawning. Her gun and wand were both in hand when there were three sharp knocks on the door, and then two more. Relaxed, but still armed, she moved to the door and let Barrel and Green inside.

“Authorization?”

“Number-alpha-green seven. Name?”

“Emilia Planter”

“Already done yourself up, I see.”

“Yeah.” Emilia smothered another yawn. “Made coffee. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Do I ever?” Barrel retorted, already heading for the kitchen.

“Do we start now?” the young woman who’d come in with him asked nervously.

“I need coffee first,” she informed her. “You’ll want to use the bathroom before we get started, it takes a few hours.”

“Okay.”

When Emilia was full of coffee and Green had emptied her bladder, Emilia dragged a chair into the bathroom and sat her down on the toilet. “I need your dossier.”

Green handed it over. Emilia pulled out the photograph and set it on the vanity, where she could see what she was doing.

“Oh, ouch,” she said when she saw the measurements. She raised her voice: “Barrel, did you get bras big enough for this?”

“Yes,” Barrel called back, sounding bored. She heard the TV flick on in the other room.

“All right, then. Let’s see what we can do with you.”

When Emilia was done, Green had blonde hair that spiralled down to her mid-back. Her bright blue eyes looked at the world from behind red-rimmed glasses that complemented her heart-shaped face. Cupid’s-bow lips and prominent cheekbones completed the picture.

She compared the photograph to the reality. “You got the good complexion this time,” she half-complained. “All right, shirt off.”

Her new hourglass-shaped body matched the beauty of her new face. Enlarging and moving bone and muscle and fat to create that shape sapped Emilia’s remaining energy and gave her a pounding headache. “You’re done,” she managed at nearly two in the afternoon.

“Is it supposed to hurt?” she asked.

Emilia stood, cracking her back and groaning. “Until you get used to your new bone structure, yes. Should only take a day or two. Those breasts might cause some back pain - I don’t know why they insist on porn breasts your first time out.”

“Porn breasts?” she asked timidly.

She flapped a hand at them. “Melons. Balloons. Whatever you wanna call it. Oh, remind me to give you my fake engagement ring.”

“Why would I want that?”

She snorted. “You’re a gorgeous woman now. It’ll stop most of the gross dudes from hitting on you. C’mon, get dressed, it’s almost time to go.”

She left the newly-created Theresa Kelly alone in the bathroom and returned to the living room. A black-and-white monster film was on the TV. Emilia dropped onto the sofa, shoved her face into the pillow, and tried to relax.

“You okay, Farmer?” Barrel asked.

“Tired. Sore,” she managed.

A hand touched her back. “You’re all in knots,” Barrel said. A moment later, both of his hands were on her back, kneading out the tension, and it was all she could do to not moan in appreciation.

Far too quickly, Barrel said, “We need to get going,” and withdrew his hands. “Kelly, you ready?”

Emilia hadn’t even heard her come in the room, but she did hear her say, “Ready.”

“C’mon, Farmer, up you get,” Barrel said. Emilia made herself get off the couch through sheer force of will. “We’ll stop by a gas station, get some food in you. Kelly, if she ever has to do that much in one sitting again, get her hot food, coffee, and a massage, and let her sleep for at least a few hours.”

“Yes, sir,” Kelly said.

True to Barrel’s word, they stopped at a Sunoco in Lorton, where Emilia bought four hot dogs and two extra-large coffees. The hot dogs were gone before they got back onto I-95.

Check-in at the FBI Academy was quick, and moving in took even less time. Emilia had a total of two duffel bags, and she was unpacked in less than twenty minutes. Kelly needed twice that, but was still done before their swearing-in and welcome lecture, which Emilia largely tuned out. Once you’d heard three greetings to a law enforcement agency, you’d heard them all.

By contrast, Kelly was abuzz with excitement when it ended. She’d never sat through a welcome lecture. It was almost worth it, to see the eagerness on her face.

Their first stop was a classroom. Dossiers were dropped on the table in the front of the room, and they were told to pick a classmate. One detail was missing from each file, and it was their job to find out what it was. If they failed, they were booted from the program.

Emilia waited until the mad crush at the front of the room died down to take the last folder. “Do you not care?” the man at the front of the room asked her.

She shrugged. “I don’t know anybody, so it doesn’t matter who I get.”

“Who did you get?”

She flipped open the folder. “Myself.”

“Switch with someone before the end of the day.”

“Yes, sir.”

They went to the shooting range next, where they traded in their red-plastic ‘guns’ for real pistols. Emilia took her place next to Kelly and fired, careful not to do as well as she really could. A girl named Shelby Wyatt flaunted her marksmanship - rumor had it she’d been a championship shooter in Georgia. Emilia could believe it.

Kelly shot well - well enough to draw attention, but not enough to make people become suspicious. As they were turning in their weapons, Caleb Haas started yelling, “I know what your secret is, Packer!” and Emilia used the commotion to whisper in Kelly’s ear, “Hide your skill better.”

She took a quick two steps away and said louder, “Hey, Kelly, the only folder left when I got up there was mine. Can we switch?”

“Sure,” Kelly said, and pulled the folder out of her backpack. They swapped and moved on to the physical conditioning - which, since it was their first day, turned out to be an assessment test. Kelly took Emilia’s advice and did more average work than she was truly capable of.

Emilia was proud of her.

Once that was done and they’d showered, Emilia had a chance to open the new folder and find her target: Ryan Booth.

A quick skim showed that the only piece of information missing was the month of his birth. That would be easy enough to find out.

While they were waiting to be dismissed from the gym, Emilia staged a conversation with Kelly. “What’s your birthstone?”

A flash of panic in Kelly’s eyes. “Emerald,” she said, not really sure if that was the answer.

“Cool,” Emilia said cheerfully. “Mine’s peridot. What’s yours?” she asked Wyatt.

“What?”

“What’s your birthstone?” she repeated.

“Uh, pearl.”

“Awesome! I love pearls,” she said, as though Wyatt was a confidante. “What about you?”

Booth blinked at her. “What?”

“Your birthstone!” she said cheerfully. “I was wondering what it is. I’m peridot, Kelly’s emerald, and Wyatt’s pearl.”

“Uh, ruby.”

“Neat!” she said brightly, and - mission accomplished - she asked two more for their birthstones before they were dismissed.

The next day, after physical training and the shooting range, they entered the classroom for the interrogation. Wyatt’s parents had died on 9/11; Parrish’s mother had shot her father; and then it was Booth’s turn to be hooked up to the lie detector.

Emilia glanced at it as she walked in. “I don’t know why they bother with that,” she said. “Your birth month’s missing. What is it?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because you told me your birthstone yesterday,” she said patiently. “I could just blurt it out, but the point of this exercise is to get you to admit it, so unless we want to go through the tedious process of me listing each month and you saying ‘no’ six times, I thought we could skip that. So - what month were you born in?”

“September,” he said.

Emilia glanced over at the woman running the polygraph, who nodded.

“Interesting,” she said, sitting down across from him. “‘Cause see, yesterday, you told me your birthstone was ruby. While sapphires and rubies are both corundum, they’re not the same thing. So were you lying yesterday, or are you lying today?”

“Neither!”

Emilia pulled out her phone and, keeping eye contact, opened up the voice-search function. “What is September’s birthstone?”

“September’s birthstone is sapphire,” her phone answered.

“Ruby is the birthstone of which month?”

“Ruby is the birthstone of July.”

She turned off her phone. “So. Is it September or July, Ryan?”

“September!”

“So you don’t know your own birthstone?”

Booth huffed and put his head down. “Look. Yesterday, I thought you were being weird, asking everyone about their birthstones. I just said something to make you stop talking to me.”

Emilia nodded. “So you lied to me yesterday.”

“Yes.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth now?”

“I’m hooked up to a polygraph.”

“And those have certainly never been fooled before. Is your birthday in July?”

“No.”

The woman running the polygraph nodded: truth.

“Is your birthday in September?”

“Yes.”

Another nod. Truth.

Hermione slid the folder closed. “All right,” she said. “Either you lied to me yesterday or you’re lying to me now. To be perfectly frank, I don’t trust polygraphs, so I’m relying on you. Your honor. Your honesty. Do you have honor? Are you capable of honesty?”

Booth glared and didn’t answer.

“No? Yes?”

Booth kept glaring.

“Fine, then. Your birthday’s in September. September the twelfth, isn’t it?”

His eyes widened slightly. “Yes,” he said.

She slammed her hand on the table. “ _Liar._ ”

“That’s enough, Planter,” crackled over the intercom.

“He’s lying,” she insisted.

“Polygraph says he’s not.”

Booth was already unstrapping himself from the polygraph. He high-tailed it out of there. Simmering, Emilia followed.

Why was Booth lying about something as simple as his birthday, and why was Instructor O'Connor protecting him?

She nearly forgot all about it when it was Caleb Haas’s turn to interrogate Eric Packer. Haas had been nagging him constantly, and it appeared Packer had had enough, because as soon as the door closed behind them, Packer shot the woman running the polygraph and turned the gun on Haas.

Emilia gripped the table, watching it all play out on the screen. O'Connor and a few of the students sprinted for the interview room; Kelly started to join them, but Emilia grabbed her shirt and yanked her back into her seat.

“Don’t. Draw. Attention,” she breathed.

Onscreen, Packer was screaming at Haas, who was yelling back that he’d just been trying to make him slip up. O'Connor was pushing at the door, but Packer had locked it.

Finally, tears running down his face, Packer said, “I never meant for her to die,” and shot himself under the chin.

Haas stared at the body until O'Connor’s pounding shook him from the trance. He unlocked the door. O'Connor and a few other agents ran in, checking pulses, pulling Haas from the room, unloading the gun. Typical post-violence cleanup.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn’t get officially dismissed. Emilia kept her uncharitable thoughts about that to herself and instead headed back to their room.

Over the next few days, all anyone could talk about was the shooting. Quantico called in counselors for them to talk to, and there were a few group therapy sessions that were absolutely mandatory. The agent at the range who had kept Packer’s fake gun instead of swapping it for the real one was fired, or at least reassigned. There was a lot of crying and some shouting, too, when nightmares of the incident woke the others. Emilia and Kelly did their work silently and, while friendly with the other recruits, kept away from the drama playing out between Parrish and Booth.

When they weren’t in class, they were snooping around. The laptop Emilia kept stored in a false bottom of her dresser had so many layers of encryptions and protections it was almost funny. Courtesy of the USA’s NSA, there was a program installed that could bypass the FBI encryptions, and another that would decrypt any file she loaded into it. Her first stop was at the digital desk of Miranda Shaw, the Deputy Director who ran the training program. Nothing suspicious came up, though she spent an awful lot of time looking at her son’s parole proceedings. She was either a concerned mother or an unsuspected participant in his plot to shoot up his school.

Kelly bugged their instructors’ offices and the recruits’ rooms, and set up a program to sift through the chatter and noise to find meaning. Any mention of ‘bomb’, ‘terrorism’, or ‘trust’ was flagged for their perusal.Kelly went through it, noted anything interesting in code, and then left it for Emilia. From that they learned that their next exercise was supposed to fail.

O'Connor introduced them to the analyst team the next week. Caleb Haas showed up - everyone had assumed he’d washed out, but it appeared he’d been shuffled over to analysis instead. Once O’Connor had gone through the tech analyst’s job and everyone had suffered through some truly unfortunate hero-worship from Elias Harper (apparently Simon Asher was the first openly gay agent recruit), O'Connor led them to a warehouse with three scenes set up.

“These are recreations of places in which terrorist plots were being formulated,” he told them. “The FBI raided them before they could come to fruition. Your job is to figure out what the plot was and where it was to have taken place.”

Kelly took the scene on the far right. Emilia took the one on the far left. As they got started, Shaw joined O'Connor in watching them work.

It was almost painful, to watch this group work the scene. The few former police did okay, but almost nobody changed their gloves between handling pieces of evidence, they grabbed electronics with abandon, there was no examination for pressure pads or other unpleasant surprises...in short, it was exactly what she expected from a group of untrained agents. Why hadn’t they gone over scene processing before being told to find the evidence?

It took Emilia all of five minutes to discover a notebook written in code - a basic substitution cipher, one she did in her head as she took it dutifully to their analyst. It was a plane number, an airport code, and a time.

“Aha!” one of her teammates yelled, and she looked over her shoulder in time to see him heft a block of beige clay over his head in triumph.

Time slowed down. Sweat popped out on her forehead. It was rare for instinct to take precedence over her training, but an idiot twenty-four-year-old was waving a brick of C4 around like it was Play-Doh. She tackled the analyst to the ground and covered him with her body, barely aware she was yelling but knowing with certainty that if that brick went off it didn’t matter how they were situated - the warehouse would be wiped off the map.

O'Connor pulled her off and dragged her outside. “What was that about?” he demanded.

She closed her eyes and took a breath, pulling her mind back into control and her cover to the front. She was at training for FBI recruits. Her name was Emilia Planter. “I panicked.”

“That much is obvious,” he said. “Why?”

She shook her head. “He was throwing C4 around like - like Play-Doh.”

O'Connor’s face softened slightly. “It’s not real C4.”

“I know,” she mumbled. “I just - reacted.”

He clasped her shoulder. “I read your file. I saw what happened to your parents.” He gestured to his face. “That where you got the scar?”

“Yeah.”

“Look. I know it’s hard, but try to remember that you’re safe here, all right? Nobody’s putting actual C4 in with trainees. Bomb squad’s over in another field.” She smiled weakly at his joke. “You okay to go back in there?”

“Yeah,” she said, squaring her shoulders.

“Don’t panic,” O'Connor said again, and let her go.

Kelly was smirking when they got back into their room. “What happened to ‘don’t draw attention’?”

She grimaced. “Dude pulled out a block of C4. I reacted. Most times, if you’re not expecting explosives and they show up, you’ve been blown anyway so it’s no use keeping cover.”

“That so?”

“Yep.” She kicked her shoes off and padded over to pull the laptop out from beneath her bras. “You listen in yet?”

“Not yet,” Kelly admitted, and took the laptop when it was offered. Emilia went to take a long, hot shower.

The next afternoon, they met with the analysts again. O'Connor told them to determine the immediate threat. Most divided themselves neatly into three categories, but Parrish started talking about how it wasn’t any of them. Emilia agreed with her, but - for the sake of keeping cover - she chose a group at random and followed them to a room where two agents informed them that - to put it politely - they’d fucked up.

There was still nothing on any of the bugs or in anybody’s email when they went to bed that night.


	2. Profile

There were still no leads when they began the profiling unit. Tasked with creating psychological profiles of all their classmates, Emilia and Kelly mostly observed in silence and jotted down what they saw - including the reactions to other people asking questions.

The day after those were turned in, Shaw joined them in the classroom and called their reports “the most searing insights” she’d seen yet. Their scores were supposedly posted outside - but when the group swarmed into the hallway, they found instead quotes about themselves with the author’s names attached.

Emilia’s was harsh, but no harsher than the others: _A loner, her inability to trust will likely get someone killed one day._

_The scars on her face match the scars on her soul: deep, never-healing, and viciously apparent._

_Hypervigilant to the point of paranoia._

_Secretive and aloof._

Fights were breaking out around her, friends turning on friends. Shaw’s voice cut through the din: “I told you they were incisive. You have until tonight to choose three people to cut from the program.”

“What if we don’t?” Parrish asked.

“I’ll cut ten. Dismissed.”

Their classmates continued fighting all the way up to the dormitory. When the door closed behind them, Kelly sat heavily on her bed and stared forlornly at her paper.

“Don’t let them get to you,” Emilia said, hauling out the laptop. “They don’t know you. They don’t know either of us.”

“That’s kinda the problem,” Kelly said weakly. “They called me cold and aloof. An ice princess, one said.”

“That’s our job,” Emilia said firmly. “No emotional entanglements. We get in, we do the job, we get out. Friends, family, romance - it just makes the job harder.”

“But isn’t it lonely?”

Emilia shrugged. “It’s the job,” she repeated. “You’ll probably only have another three years before it doesn’t matter anymore. And you make friends under. They’re temporary, and you’re lying to them, but you make them.”

“This is just...so different from what I was told it would be.”

“Yeah. Here’s a hint: they always lie to you when you’re being recruited. Do you think Shaw or O'Connor actually believe half the shit they spout out? Why do you think it sounds so rehearsed?”

“I guess,” she mumbled, unconvinced.

Emilia tried not to roll her eyes as she turned back to the computer. “Let’s see if anything new came in today.”

It didn’t, but the argument that erupted in the hallway and the smaller arguments over the next few days were very illuminating. Paying close attention to them, Emilia and Kelly pieced together more details on their fellow trainees, including Nimah Amin’s mercurial attributes and how she would switch hands that she wrote with. Emilia snuck in and planted a bug, sure that she was up to something, but she hadn’t expected to find out that Nimah had a twin sister that Shaw had snuck in to train in secret.

That definitely made it into the report sent to Barrel on the NSA’s laptop.

Two weeks later, they were no closer to finding the plot. Emilia asked for, and received, links to bugs planted in the supervising agents’ houses by the NSA unit that had loaned them the laptop. She also bugged the rest of the dorm rooms, using a rather convenient fire to empty the dorm. It seemed _somebody_ liked to smoke in the public bathrooms. She wet her hair to complete the lie of being in the shower when the alarm went off, which was why she was the last one out.

It was a lot of information, and most of what they caught was their fellow trainees reviewing the day’s lessons or teachers planning them out. It was kind of amazing how often the words “terrorism” and “bomb” cropped up in the FBI Academy. One good thing did come out of it, though: they overheard Booth and O'Connor talking about Booth’s undercover assignment, focused on Parrish. Emilia sent off a quick email to Barrel asking for any information he had on her.

The lesson on going undercover had them creating their own identities, which were then scrutinized and attacked by O'Connor. Emilia and Kelly had theirs done quickly, but dawdled before handing them in so they weren’t seen to be the first ones done. Both passed O'Connor’s inspection with flying colors.

Then they were taken to a retreat for a company called Dystek Corporate and told to get a meeting with the CEO. But there was a twist: they were going to be assigned random identities.

That pissed Emilia right off. She’d been doing this job seventeen years, and never had she had to learn an entirely new cover in under ten minutes. It just wasn’t something that _happened_ in the real world. She knew the point was to test their memories under pressure, but if something happened where there were only ten minutes to learn a cover, somebody had fucked up and was probably getting wetworked, and the person having to learn it was probably going to die.

Still, Emilia pulled her game face on and, as Diana Lassiter, schmoozed her way into a meeting with the CEO. Kelly met her there, as did a few of their other classmates.

Likewise, they passed the surveillance tests the next week with flying colors. They were starting to get a bead on who might be involved, thanks to the bugs at the agents’ homes and in the dorms. It definitely wasn’t any of the trainees; the sheer amount of sex that Emilia and Kelly were unfortunate enough to see ruled them right out.

They ramped up surveillance on O'Connor, Shaw, and Deputy Director Haas. Of everyone, they were the most capable of putting together a plot, and the least accessible to two middle-of-the-road trainees.

They were so busy sorting through the intel they were almost late to their written midterm. O'Connor and Shaw both gave them a look when they hurried through the door, but said nothing. Their papers were already face-down at their seats. Once they’d sat, Shaw cleared her throat.

“Upon your arrival,” she began, “I promised myself I’d graduate the best group of agents the FBI has ever seen. We don’t need _more_ agents, we need _better_ ones. This test is designed to see not only what you’ve learned so far, but what you have become. In front of you is a piece of paper and a pencil. When I leave this room, the test begins. When it ends is up to you.”

She and O'Connor walked out. The soft _click_ of the closing door was heard even in the back of the room. For a moment, nobody breathed - and then somebody flipped her paper over and yelled, “It’s blank! What’s going on?”

That opened the floodgates:

“How is a blank piece of paper a test?”

“How's a raven like a writing desk?” 

“Just another twisted Quantico psychological experiment.” 

“Maybe we're supposed to write an essay?” 

“On what?” 

“Why we deserve to be here.” 

“Then leave yours blank.”

Parrish’s voice cut through the din: “You guys, maybe it's evidence.” 

“Of what?” someone demanded. 

“Well, Miranda did say they're testing all the skills that we've learned so far, and the only thing this falls under is evidence.”

“Miranda?” Kelly whispered. They traded a look: a trainee on first-name basis with the trainers was definitely suspicious.

Parrish was still talking: “Okay. All right, everyone. Give them up. Let's take a look.” 

Willing to follow Parrish’s lead - mostly because it would make her stand out if she argued - Emilia passed hers forward. Parrish collected them all, leafing through them and talking to herself the whole time.

“8 1/2 by 11 and 3/8 inches tall. Maybe it fits somewhere? Or maybe it has something to do with the number. 60?” 

Vazquez said, “60? Wait, are you sure?” 

“I did it three times,” Parrish insisted.

“There's 61 of us here,” Vazquez said. “Did anyone not hand in their piece of paper? Or not get one at all?” 

Parrish scowled. “Okay, whoever is holding out could be the key to cracking this exam, so you better speak up now.”

When no one said anything, Amin added, “If no one confesses, we can always move to surveillance.”

Still, no one moved.

Amin pulled up the computer at the front of the room. Kelly whispered to Emilia, “Nobody’s neighbors noticed?”

“So much for being vigilant,” she muttered back. “C’mon, everyone’s moving. Take the left side, I get right. Meet at the computer, but don’t be obvious.”

Unfortunately for Emilia, the Booth/Parrish drama was playing out on the right side of the room. They snarked at each other about lies and manipulation while those nearby pretended not to hear it. Emilia rolled her eyes and kept sidling forward, reaching the front computer without hearing anything relevant. Everyone was too wrapped up in their own personal dramas for anyone to be paying close attention, anyway.

It was Brandon who was missing a paper. Brandon, whom she’d discarded as a suspect and never thought about again. Brandon, who was convinced he was about to fail out. Brandon, who hadn’t wanted to make things worse for himself by speaking up.

Brandon, who ran out of the room and set off an alarm that locked the doors.

Elias Harper, one of the analysts, held up a timer. “Uh, guys?” he said tentatively. “Either Brandon’s really into being punctual, or something weird is going on here.”

Unsurprisingly, that set off a panic. The trainees started chattering excitedly, arguing over whether this was real or a test. Parrish and Booth figured out how the door had locked and started going through his profile, looking for something to tell them if this was supposed to be happening.

Kelly muttered to Emilia, “What do you think?”

She thought. “I’m not sure. I think it’s part of the test, but it could be real. Not enough information to be sure.”

The trainees started to interrogate Vazquez, who was sleeping with Brandon. 

“Brandon hasn't been himself lately,” she admitted. “Last night, he went on a walk alone for hours. He came back talking about how mismanaged the FBI is and how something needed to be done about it. He's also on a bunch of meds. Sometimes he doesn't take them.” 

“Wait, what time did Brandon go out last night?” 

“10:00, maybe 10:30. Why?”

“Because if he did something,” Emilia said, making several people look like owls when they swiveled their heads and blinked at her, “he’d be on tape in here. Can someone rewind the footage, please?”

They watched on the monitor as Brandon entered the room and fiddled with something beneath the podium. Booth opened it to reveal-

“What is that?”

“Looks like Brandon left us a parting gift,” Booth said bleakly. 

“Is it real?”

“It looks real.”

“Who knows how to defuse a bomb?”

“I got it,” Emilia said instantly, moving forward.

Immediately, there were objections.

“How do you know that?”

“You’re, like, bottom of the class!”

“How do we know you won’t screw up?”

“Do you even know what you’re doing?”

Emilia raised her hands for quiet. “My entire family was killed by a bomb,” she said. “I learned everything I could about them. I used to be bomb squad. May I get in there now, please?”

The bodies parted like the Red Sea. Emilia knelt down in front of the metal cube and opened the hatch, revealing a timer and wires criss-crossed everywhere.

“Where’s the charge?” she muttered to herself, eyes tracing the wires. They all disappeared behind a metal plate, to which the timer was wired.

“Does anyone have a flathead screwdriver?” she asked. 

“I’ve got a nail clipper,” Wyatt offered, passing it to her.

Emilia flipped it open and slid the metal into the slot. It would be hard if she was a Muggle, but she had magic, and she’d trained it for years to be able to do small, simple things without her wand. Rotating a screw was easy.

The back panel came off. She grasped it with both hands and pulled it forward just enough to be able to see what was behind it. Four bricks of beige clay met her eyes.

“Shit.”

“What?” someone asked, a note of panic in his voice. “What’s wrong?”

“C4,” she said. “This thing goes off it’ll vaporize the wing. Okay, let’s see. Has anyone ever looked at his browsing history?”

“Yeah,” Haas answered. “I borrowed his laptop once.”

“You’re his roommate,” she said. “I need you to think. Did he ever have books about explosives, or anything suspicious on his laptop?”

“No.”

“Okay, that’s good. It means he’s not real sure what he’s doing.” Unless he’d done similar things before, but somehow she doubted he was smart enough to fool an FBI background check _and_ be in deep cover for three months. That took dedication and the ability to think on the fly. “This is a simple IED. Okay, so most timed bombs you have two wires. One’s hooked to the charge and sends the pulse that sets off the explosive. This one has five charge wires, so there’s four red herrings. Cutting a dead wire will cause it to detonate.”

“How do you which ones are dead?” Parrish asked.

Emilia glanced at the timer. Fifteen minutes. “It’s an art,” she answered, examining the wires closely and disregarding the wire connected to the mercury switches. She wasn’t tampering with the timer itself, so that one shouldn’t be an issue. “There’s always some kind of signal for the live wire, so the maker doesn’t accidentally blow themselves up. He wasn’t in here long enough to do all five charge wires, so the four dead ones were already inserted. He just had to put in the live one and set the timer. What’s the difference?” By the end she was talking more to herself, scanning for anything unusual about any of the wires.

She could feel herself sweating and impatiently wiped her forehead on her sleeve. “Come on, come on,” she muttered, willing herself to see the markers. If she tried to use magic to disarm it, the electronics would go haywire and probably detonate the charges.

Finally, she spotted it: a thin black line encircling four of the five wires. She checked the fifth for a circle, carefully moving the plate through which the wires were connected to the timer, and it was clear. She took out her pocketknife and cut the live wire.

The doors unlocked. The air conditioning kicked back on. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

“I didn’t sign up for this,” Harper said, semi-hysterically. “I did _not_ sign up to be in a room with a bomb!”

“Someone get Shaw and O'Connor,” Emilia said just as the door clicked open and the timer beeped. Looking down, she saw in horror that the timer was going twice as fast and the display showed nine minutes left. “Scratch that, everyone get out of here. Pull the fire alarm, evacuate the building. Go.”

Most of the students immediately left, but at the door, Parrish hesitated. “Aren’t you coming?” she asked.

Emilia shook her head. “I might still be able to disarm it,” she said. “If I let go of this plate, it might make the tripwire think the timer’s being tampered with. It’ll detonate immediately.” The fire alarm started blaring shrilly, and the sprinklers kicked on, dousing them in treated water. “Go, Parrish.”

She moved back into the room. “I’m not leaving you.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Emilia snapped at her. “All you can do is die. Go! Now!”

Parrish took a one hesitant step back, then another. She turned around and ran.

Emilia was alone with a bomb. She looked down, not even seeing the explosive nearly in her lap. 

Five minutes on the timer. She saw Snape-cum-Stroop in the curve of the wires, his cynicism and his heart of stone. She saw the blank, staring eyes of Nadya Wilson, Hermione’s first willing kiss, in the water streaking down the metal of the plate. She saw her parents in the matte finish of the charges. She saw Ivana Pavlova in the crease where metal met metal. She saw Alastor Moody’s body, twisted and bloody and still in death, where the bricks had been pressed together. She saw Barrel rubbing his bum hip in the welded corner. She saw her former covers in the reflection of Emilia Planter’s face, the scars the only permanent things about Hermione Granger’s appearance.

Three minutes. She wasn’t even going to die with her own face. She’d be buried as a stranger, with no ties to the world but for Barrel. Her old mentors, her one-time friends, all left behind for a life of lies. Nobody would care if she ceased to exist but for her boss and, perhaps, her trainee.

Two minutes. If she had a Time-Turner, if she could go back and change her life’s path, if she could make it so her dumbass teenage self never agreed to spy on Voldemort, what would her life be like? Would she be married? Have kids? Could she have made herself blind to the evils of the world? Or would the evils have followed her from childhood, preventing her from finding peace?

One minute. Every time she’d ever cheated death flew through her mind. She’d been shot, stabbed, beaten. Once she’d been thrown from a cliff, and only luck and her own innate magic had saved her. She’d been cut until her heart struggled to pump what little blood she had left. The Irish had once blown up a building with her in it, the basis for her cover’s lack of family. Her cover had never been blown, but plenty of people disposed of others when there was no more use for them.

Five seconds. She closed her eyes.

 _Beepbeepbeepbeepbeep_. She took her last breath and waited for the cold embrace of oblivion.

It never came. She was forced to take another breath of air, then another. And another. She opened her eyes on her third breath to see the timer reading zero. She hadn’t blown up.

The bomb was part of the goddamn midterm. It probably wasn’t even real C4. What had O’Connor said outside the warehouse their second week? “Nobody’s putting real explosives in with trainees”?

Anger rose inside her, a coiling snake burning her insides. The timer sparked and broke - maybe the sprinkler water had gotten inside the casing, but more likely her magic was responding to her emotional state. She was losing control.

People could die if she lost control. 

She forced her temper back down, bottling it up until she could get somewhere safe to release it. Only once she’d stopped throwing off sparks did she set the plate carefully on the ground and go outside.

The sun was shining. Birds chirped in the trees. A soft wind blew. The only thing marring such a beautiful day was the blaring of the fire alarm. 

Emilia stalked toward her class, most of whom were drenched. O'Connor was standing in front of them, looking at the building. Off to the side, Shaw was talking to a fireman, mouth moving a mile a minute. Her finger jabbed at the class of trainees for emphasis.

Emilia stopped in front of O'Connor and glared at him. “What,” she said, “the fuck.”

His eyebrows raised. “Excuse me?”

“What the fuck,” she repeated, louder now. “You planted a _fake bomb! What the fuck is WRONG WITH YOU?_ ”

“Miss Planter, calm down,” O'Connor began, putting a hand on her shoulder.

She swatted it off. “Don’t you ‘calm down’ me!” she shrieked at him. “You put a fake bomb in a federal building!”

“Trainee Planter,” Shaw said, trying to get her attention.

It worked. “And you!” she screamed. “What the fuck! What the FUCK!”

“You need to calm down,” Shaw snapped at her.

Shaw was right, but if anything, that just pissed her off more. “Don’t tell me to calm down,” she snarled.

“Emilia,” O'Connor tried.

And then, for no discernable reason, her anger gave way to full-body sobs. Her legs gave out, and she crumpled to the ground. She felt hands on her, soothing. A blanket was draped over her shoulders. She heard voices above her. Somewhere along the line the alarm shut off. She leaned against a soft shoulder, still crying. The crowd of voices moved away. An arm wrapped around her.

She came back to herself in the Quantico parking lot, leaning on Agent O'Connor’s shoulder with her head beneath his chin. He was rocking her back and forth, mumbling absolute nonsense.

She pulled away and sniffled. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “It was a difficult test. We haven’t seen a result like it before. Usually everyone works together and stays until the end. Anyone who runs fails.”

“You do this with every class?”

“Every one. We’re not sure how we’re going to grade this, honestly - you took over so well you obviously passed, but some of the others…” He shook his head. “It’s a lot easier when the whole class stays behind.”

“Sorry for messing it up,” she said.

“We should have seen it coming,” he said. “You did well under pressure.”

“Thanks.”

There was a moment of awkward silence before O'Connor said, “Do you want to talk about your family?”

“Not really.”

“We can get a psychologist in here, if it’s just me you don’t want to talk to.”

She shook her head. “It was a long time ago. I’m over it, it’s just that sometimes….” She trailed off.

He filled in the blank she’d left for him. “Something triggers the memories,” he said.

“Exactly.” She smiled wanly. “I should probably get back to my dorm.”

“Of course.” They stood. Emilia handed him his suit jacket - what she’d mistaken for a blanket. “Will you be all right?”

“I’ll be fine,” she assured him.

“I’ll walk you up anyway.”

They took the elevator in silence. Emilia couldn’t help feeling foolish over her meltdown - that was decompression, and she was still in deep cover. It couldn’t happen again - shouldn’t have ever happened at all. It wasn’t the first time she’d been sure she was about to die, so why had this one affected her so badly?


	3. Solo

Over the weekend, Emilia buried herself in her work. The incident in the parking lot had made her doubt O'Connor was behind the plot, but she couldn’t be sure enough to strike him off the list. 

At six o’clock Monday morning, O'Connor came down the hallway, banging on doors. “Let’s go!” he yelled. “Mandatory gun training, ten minutes!”

“Why?” Kelly whimpered.

“Because he can,” Emilia said, throwing the other girl’s henley over her face. “Up and at ‘em, kid.”

“You have to be ready to go in any place, at any time,” the shooting instructor told them. “You’ll be doing the city in pairs of my choosing.”

Parrish and Planter were next to each other, alphabetically, so Emilia was paired with her. They cleared the city quickly and efficiently, hitting the masked bad guys and avoiding the civilians. They had the fastest score in the class.

“Good job,” Parrish said, holding up her hand.

“You, too,” Emilia said, giving her a high-five. 

The rest of training progressed normally, but with one big surprise: Shaw came clean about Nimah and Raina, the Amin twins, at the beginning of the afternoon classwork. She immediately charged the rest of them with keeping it secret, and then told them they were now free to leave on weekends and at night.

Emilia’s hair prickled the moment she stepped into the room she shared with Kelly. She dropped her bookbag and complained, “Oh, really?” when the unzipped top spilled her belongings everywhere.

While she was on her hands and knees, gathering her things, she cast a quiet, wandless spell to sweep for bugs. A small _ping_ near the door let her know the spell had found one.

She finished picking up her stuff and said casually, “Kelly, I feel like fast food tonight. Wanna come with?”

“Sure,” Kelly said. 

The bug that had been planted over their door glowed a bright, cheerful pink. Emilia swung her backpack into her left hand, using it to obscure the drawer’s false bottom from view as she pulled out the NSA laptop and a shirt. She slid the laptop under her bed when she bent down to drop her backpack and untie her shoes.

When she came out of the bathroom from changing her shirt, she pulled out the laptop and said, “Bet they have Wi-Fi.”

She waited until they were in the car and moving before she cast the Surveillance Revealing Spell again. Nothing lit up - they were unwatched. Without preamble, she said, “Someone put a bug in our room.”

“Shit,” Kelly said, nearly swerving off the road.

“I know,” she said grimly. “I don’t know if it’s everyone or just us.”

“So that’s why you brought the laptop.”

“Yep. I wanna know who.”

“Probably the guy we were sent here to find.”

“Probably.”

The rest of the drive was made in silence. They bought cheap, salty cardboard from one of the nameless national fast-food chains and sat in the car to look through what their security cameras had found.

O’Connor had been the one to bug their dorm room. Flipping through the footage of the other trainees’ rooms, they found he’d bugged the rest of them, too. It was a minor miracle he hadn’t found any of their bugs - but then, they were all covered by Obscuring Charms that Hermione had developed to not interfere with the signal. He wouldn’t have seen them unless he was specifically looking for them, and he wouldn’t have had a reason to look for bugs in the trainees’ bunks.

“Let’s go to his house,” Emilia said when they’d finished viewing the footage. She typed an email to Barrel while Kelly drove. The laptop connected to one of O’Connor’s neighbors’ home networks, and she sent it.

O’Connor’s house was dark. A quick check of the surveillance tapes revealed that he had come home from Quantico during the lunch break, fiddled with his computer, and returned to the trainees. He was still safely at his desk in Quantico. “Toss it?” Kelly asked.

“Might as well,” Emilia answered, sliding on a hat and gloves. “Let’s see your lock-picking skills.”

Kelly didn’t get it done as quickly as Emilia could have, but they were still in the door in less than a minute. They closed it behind them and locked it again. On the wall, a security-system panel beeped at them. Emilia typed in the company’s override code - she had them all committed to memory - and went on her way.

She went upstairs while Kelly stayed on the main level. Emilia snooped through the hall bathroom first, certain she wouldn’t find anything. She was right. His guest bedroom was equally clear.

In the master bedroom, she found a safe in the back of the closet. She didn’t bother with the tumblers, just pointed her wand and mumbled, “ _Alohomora._ ” The safe clicked open.

His birth certificate. His social security card. A few thousand cash. Tax returns from the past five years. A gun holster. Spare ammunition. All things that people with nothing to hide would keep in a fireproof safe. She used her fingers to explore the safe and withdrew them, disappointed, when there were no hidden compartments.

She left the interior exactly as she’d found it and continued checking the room. Nothing under his bed, between the mattress and box-spring, or in the nightstand. His dresser just held clothes and briefs. His bathroom was a typical bachelor’s.

She returned downstairs to find Kelly poring over an unfolded map. “Whatcha got?” she asked.

Kelly squeaked and jumped. “You scared me!” she whispered.

“Always be aware of your surroundings,” she reprimanded her. “What did you find?”

“Grand Central Station blueprints,” Kelly answered. “There’s some math on the side.”

Emilia looked it over. “Weak points in the foundation,” she said. “What does that mean?”

“Demolition. He’s going to bomb it.”

“Yep.” She looked at her watch. “We’ve been here ten minutes. Let’s go.”

Kelly drove aimlessly while Emilia called Barrel.

“Yes?” he growled into the phone.

“Farmer. Unit Number Alpha-Green-Seven, authorization pineapple mango.”

“Barrel. Unit Number Alpha-Green-Seven, authorization apple tango.”

“We’ve got him with a map.”

“Who?”

“O’Connor.”

“Pick him up.”

“He’s still at Quantico.”

“Hood him. Go.”

Barrel hung up. Emilia locked her cell and said, “Back to Quantico.”

She opened the laptop as Kelly drove them. The laptop was perpetually connected to the internet, something to do with satellites or maybe Bluetooth - Emilia honestly hadn’t understood a fifth of what the tech had explained, and asking questions had made the topic even more muddy, and quite honestly she wasn’t even sure it was the internet they were using - so she watched O’Connor’s office bug on the screen. He stretched and walked around a bit, poured himself coffee from the coffeemaker in his office, typed at his computer. They had just parked when he grabbed his jacket.

“He’s leaving,” Emilia said, unbuckling her seatbelt. “You ready?”

“Do we really want to do this in the parking lot?” Kelly asked, but she, too, was unbuckling her seat belt.

“No better place,” Emilia answered.

They slid into place on the side of O’Connor’s car facing away from the cameras and waited. When the doors unlocked and O’Connor had started the car, the two of them slipped in.

“What-” O’Connor started.

Emilia jabbed the barrel of her .22 into his side. “Drive,” she ordered. “I’ll tell you when to turn.”

“I’m an FBI agent,” O’Connor said even as he reversed out of his space.

“Who gives a shit?” Emilia answered, poking him harder. “Left.”

“My name is Liam O’Connor,” he said. “My mother’s name is Diana. My father’s name is Robert.” He kept blathering, trying to humanize himself to them. He didn’t realize it wasn’t going to work.

He was still talking when Emilia directed him into a dark parking lot without cameras. Before he had the car turned off, she shot him.

Emilia and Kelly maneuvered him into the back of the car. Kelly put a bag over his head and pressure on the wound while Emilia drove to the warehouse leased by a shell company, owned by twenty-six successive shell companies that ended at a man who didn’t technically exist. They took him in at the loading dock, where Barrel was waiting for them. After identifying themselves to everyone’s satisfaction, they got down to business.

“You shot him?” Barrel asked.

“He shouldn’t bleed out,” Emilia said with a shrug. “That’s the important bit.”

Barrel shook his head. “Green, you’re with me,” he said. “Get O’Connor into the main room.” When Kelly didn’t move, Barrel said, “ _Now._ ”

Kelly jumped into action. Once she had dragged O’Connor out of sight, Barrel said, “Your other request has been answered.”

“And?”

“You will be allowed to retire if - and only if - you remain with a federal agency operating within a member of the United Nations.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. “You want me to stay with the FBI.”

“Yes. You may retire from the FBI when they allow you to do so. One of us will check up on you every three months. At the first sign of you going rogue, you will be wetworked. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good. let’s talk logistics.”


	4. Epilogue

When Hermione entered the classroom the following afternoon, it was with the spells taken off her hair and her body, and the Color-Change Charm taken off her eyes. Her bushy brown hair sprung out in all directions - with the pixie cut, it wasn’t quite long enough to hang down under its own weight. She could have fixed that with magic, but she was in a Muggle job, and if she changed too quickly she’d draw attention.

Rather than taking her usual seat, she sat on the desk at the front of the room and examined her classmates. Most were whispering to each other, trying to hide their interest but failing miserably.

Shaw strode in, Deputy Director Haas on her heels. Their other instructors and a few unfamiliar agents trailed in behind them. “Have a seat,” Shaw called. She looked at Hermione through narrowed eyes, but Deputy Director Haas came forward with his hand out.

“It’s an honor to meet you properly,” he said.

“And you, sir,” she said, shaking his hand.

“I was told you may need to decompress?”

“Done this morning,” she said promptly.

“Are you ready?”

“I am.”

Haas cleared his throat and pivoted to face the class. “Hello, everyone,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to be here today. I’m sure some of you recognize the woman standing here beside me?”

There were a few mumbles, but nobody spoke up.

“No one?” Haas asked, sounding deeply disappointed.

“She does look quite a bit different,” Shaw said grudgingly.

Hermione grinned. “You should’ve seen me with my own face.”

There was some muttering.

“That’s enough,” Shaw said sharply.

Haas cleared his throat. “Everyone, for the past few months, you’ve known the woman beside me as Emilia Planter.”

“No way,” someone blurted, and suddenly the trainees and teachers were all talking. Shaw’s attempts to restore order were ignored, and so were Haas’s. The current agents glanced between the recruits and Hermione. One leaned over to another and whispered something.

Finally, it quieted down, and Haas said, “Miss Planter has been working for an international intelligence agency similar to Interpol for seventeen years. The reason for her presence is classified at the highest level, but she has made the decision to retire and join us here at the FBI permanently. She will take questions, but accept that some things are classified beyond her ability to explain. Miss Granger?”

It was surreal to be called ‘Granger’ again. She had gone by that name less than half her life.

Haas gently nudging her arm made her blink back to awareness. Nearly everyone in the room had a hand up.

She picked at random. “Booth?”

“How old are you? Really?”

“Thirty...four? Five? My covers have been so many different ages I lost track a bit. Asher?”

“What happened to Kelly?”

“Kelly left for another assignment.Parrish?”

“How did you get involved?”

Hermione shrugged. “When I was fifteen, there were neo-Nazis recruiting at my school. I was the right age, and my parents were out of the picture, so I was asked to go under. A year later we took down the group, and my supervisor showed up and offered me a job.”

“You didn’t need any degrees?”

“Nope. My covers have had a lot of them - the one before I came here I actually had to get a Master’s in Biochem while I was under, and was working towards a Ph.D, so I have those under a false name and can’t claim them. Wyatt?”

“How many covers have you had?”

Hermione shrugged. “I remember most of my long-term assignments,” she said, “but there were a few where I was under for just a few days. A couple times I’d have three, maybe four identities in a week. Seventeen years of that...maybe...a few hundred? Or so? Um...yes?” She pointed at one of the agents she didn’t know.

“Did you ever do wetwork?”

Hermione paused. “Yes,” she said finally. “I can’t give you any more details, but yes.” She pointed again.

“How’d you survive this long?”

Hermione grinned. “Mostly luck, mixed with a bit of skill. Asher?”

“What’s the worst situation you’ve ever been in?”

Hermione’s smile dropped. “You sure you want the answer to that?”

He nodded.

“I was seventeen,” she said. “It was before I was working for the agency. I went out to celebrate taking down the neo-Nazi ring. The friend I was with was killed. I spent months with people who saw me as a betrayal to my race.” She shook her head. “That’s where I got the scar on my face - when I was Emilia Planter, I said it was from the bomb that killed my parents, but it was them.”

“Are your parents dead?” Asher asked.

“Last I knew, they were living in Cokeworth. Um, Vasquez?”

“Was your cover ever blown?”

“No. What about you?” She pointed at a woman with pin-straight black hair.

“What is the hardest thing about keeping cover for so long?”

Hermione thought. “It depends on the cover,” she said finally. “I’ve had to do a lot of things for a lot of covers. This most recent one, the hardest thing was the decompression, but a lot of times proving I was mean enough to be trusted was difficult. Haas?”

“What do you mean by decompression?”

“We’re taught to sublimate ourselves,” Hermione said. “Destroy ourselves and implant a new personality. It’s tricky, it takes training, but once you master the technique you can essentially create a whole new person who takes over your body. The problem is that, psychologically, it’s devastating.” She saw the black-haired woman nodding. “That’s one reason the average person only lasts three years - they lose their minds, or they slip back into their old personality at exactly the wrong time. You’re essentially dissociating for months at a time and making another person take over your body.

“When the mission is over, you drop your cover, and your self comes rushing back. It takes over again. And for however long you were under, you couldn’t react - you had to make the cover react, not yourself. So when you come out, you experience your time under like it’s all happening again, but at an accelerated rate. Everything you did, everything you felt - think about everything that’s happened in the last month, and imagine reacting to it in an hour. That’s decompression. Brandon?”

“You said your parents were out of the picture when you were a teenager. Why?”

Hermione grimaced. “They were...pretty shitty. That’s all I’m going to say. Nimah?”

“Where are you from originally?”

“London. Raina?”

“Can you tell us about a time you almost died?”

Hermione chuckled. “I can tell you several,” she said. “The thing about the underworld and the black market and criminals in general is that they don’t really care if you get killed. I’ve been shot, stabbed, burned, thrown off cliffs...the Japanese like to use meat cleavers, and those get messy real fast. The first time I changed my face I found out I’m allergic to a common surgical anaesthetic, and that was the only time my heart actually stopped.”

“You changed your face?” Vasquez asked.

“I’ve had more plastic surgery than all Hollywood combined,” she said. “Nearly every time I change covers, I get surgery. I almost went back to my original face before I came back, but honestly, it always hurts. Whatever they do to speed up the healing time makes the pain so much worse, and I can’t take meds for it without blowing my cover, so I just have to deal.” She shrugged. “Don’t even remember my original face, honestly, I was barely eighteen last time I had it.”

“That has to be hard,” said a stone-faced agent sitting next to the woman with black hair. “Psychologically, that is. How do you keep a handle on your real identity?”

“I don’t,” she said bluntly. “Sublimation, remember? My real identity, if you’d like to call it that, is just as fake as my covers. It’s been years since I’ve let myself out for longer than a few hours at a time. Uh, Wyatt?”

“What are you going to do next? I mean, obviously you’re good at undercover, are you going to go into one of those units?”

“No way in hell,” she said promptly, startling a laugh from a few of her classmates. “I haven’t thought much about it. I’m with the FBI until I retire, so that’s...something, at least. A career plan.”

She answered until time was up, and still there were questions. She answered more during their physical training - for the first time since she’d arrived, she stopped holding back, and outperformed all of her classmates. It was the same story on the shooting range. By the time graduation rolled around, she’d managed to settle into the role of Hermione Granger, ex-spy, and even made a few friends. She sent letters to Snape and received them back; they corresponded at least once a week. Once she was out of the Academy, she was shuffled out to Albuquerque, New Mexico to join their field offices. She even managed to find a gym catering to Magicals, where she could brush up on her dueling skills and keep her physical sparring intact.

All in all, for the first time since she was a very small child, she could comfortably say that life? Was good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's that! Probably no more to this series. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!


End file.
